“The prolonged agony which left 50 million dead did not provide an enduring basis for an armistice to barbarism.”
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
Context: The hope of a benevolent civilization was shattered in the blood-soaked trenches of the First World War. The "war to end all wars" claimed sixteen million lives, and left embers which kindled an even more catastrophic conflagration.
Over the sorry course of 5,000 years of endless conflicts, some limits had been set on human savagery. Moral safeguards proscribed killing unarmed civilians and health workers, poisoning drinking waters, spreading infection among children and the disabled, and burning defenseless cities. But the Second World War introduced total war, unprincipled in method, unlimited in violence, and indiscriminate in victims. The ovens of Auschwitz and the atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki inscribed a still darker chapter in the chronicle of human brutality. The prolonged agony which left 50 million dead did not provide an enduring basis for an armistice to barbarism. On the contrary, arsenals soon burgeoned with genocidal weapons equivalent to many thousands of World War II's.
The advent of the nuclear age posed an unprecedented question: not whether war would exact yet more lives but whether war would preclude human existence altogether.
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Bernard Lown 23
American cardiologist developer of the DC defibrillator and… 1921–2021Related quotes
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 14.
“Fighting continued on a token basis, and the dead did not complain.”
Source: I Will Fear No Evil (1970), Chapter 12, p. 171
“Rank. Certainly. However wretched I may feel, I want to prolong the agony as long as possible.”
Act I
A Doll's House (1879)
third edition (2006), p. 1-2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
Source: Power and Innocence (1972), Ch. 11 : The Humanity of the Rebel
Context: Civilization begins with a rebellion. Prometheus, one of the Titans, steals fire from the gods on Mount Olympus and brings it as a gift to man, marking the birth of human culture. For this rebellion Zeus sentences him to be chained to Mount Caucasus where vultures consume his liver during the day and at night it grows back only to be again eaten away the next day. This is a tale of the agony of the creative individual, whose nightly rest only resuscitates him so that he can endure his agonies the next day.
“I and motherland are one. My name is Million, because for millions do I love and suffer agonies.”
Ja i ojczyzna to jedno. Nazywam sie Milion, bo za miliony kocham i cierpię katuszę.
Part three, scene one.
Dziady (Forefathers' Eve) http://www.ap.krakow.pl/nkja/literature/polpoet/mic_fore.htm
In a speech in 1992. Cited in Awake! magazine, 1995, 9/8; article: How Was the World 50 Years Ago?
1990s
"Heart"
Goddess Gone Fishing for a Map of the Universe (2012)
